Chapter Text
Saturn’s effervescent rings hung like a million tiny, shimmering diamonds in the atmosphere behind a sprawling city skyline. Neon buzzed along the metallic buildings, bright hues of hot pink and electric blue casting an endless glow of variant shades against the night air and all who inhabited the city beneath the lights. Planet X was fairly new in the grand scheme of things, discovered by NASA years before they publicly announced it. During the lengthy stretch of time between their findings and the grand announcement, they focused purely on colonization. While the entire planet had not yet been inhabited, the metropolis they built from the atmosphere down and then the ground up quickly became a booming, cyberpunk inspired dream by 2024. The planet itself was as large as Earth, or maybe small, depending on who you asked, and if you were lucky enough to step foot on the new ground for yourself, you had it all.
See, things had changed back on Earth. So much so, it was now only a nostalgic destination to those who were forced to return to its remnants for some form of business, or a vast, broken society far beyond how it had already been to those who could never escape.
The unfortunate part was that not many were able to escape compared to Earth’s population.
As cautioned for years, mother nature began to reclaim the land with no help from her careless inhabitants. Natural disasters and technological meltdowns were imminent— with much thanks to the major technology boom that took artificial intelligence from labs and computers and introduced it into the human population. Earth was now akin to a desolate wasteland save for any major cities which had already been crumbling long before the final blow. People woke up everyday just to survive until they didn’t anymore. They had nothing much to hold on to but the dream of seeing Planet X for themselves, and not just in news casts or online. Earth was stuck in what very quickly became the past to those who no longer inhabited it. People who were billionaires and celebrities still remained, most of them boasting that it was by choice in some form of protest against giving up on the land.
Everyone was left with their own ruins, but life continued in such a declining state, whether they wished it would or not.
Planet X, however, otherwise known as just X, was now the hot new place to be. While most everyday humans still remained on Earth, the elite, the fortuitous, and freshly built A.I. lifeforms lived there. Despite the glitz and glamor of the main circles that people dreamt of belonging to in the main metropolis, the rest of the planet was a far cry from established. Those who were able to make it by the skin of their teeth, but not of the wealthy or powerful, ruled the rest of the newly conquered world. Gangs were prevalent and cryptocurrency exchanged hands that it shouldn’t for things no one spoke of. The outskirts of major cities were riddled with crime and people who held a passionate disdain for the corruption the higher-ups of X indulged in like candy.
A.I. creations ran rampant, cybernetic figureheads graced holographic magazine covers and television screens. Man made pop stars and film icons required little to no attention to keep happy, but were programmed to want it all in order to keep the public inspired and working for the coin, just as your average Hollywood celebrity might. Because of this, they were showered with luxuries and opportunities that made the lower class outliers sick to their stomachs, thus causing them to vow to bring down the hierarchy if it was the last thing they did. The individuals that couldn’t stand these cybernetic beings' lack of empathy for humanity fought against them, and in turn, the big-wigs played dirty to see that things worked in their favor at every turn.
In this grand metropolis of Drax City, where I also lived, the famous and infamous alike resided like royalty beyond comprehension, crypto that ‘normal people’ could never afford being passed around like penny candy in order to meet the petty whims that kept the A.I. stars working and hungry for more. There were truly no consequences to denying them, but they gave it up all the same. You see, humans didn’t become famous on X once executives realized how much easier it was to work with artificial intelligence. If you had a dream on Earth, and managed to find yourself in this new world to make it happen, you ended up tossing it into the fire with everyone else who’d made the venture before you. If a human was lucky enough, they worked for the stars. But they’d never become one.
Humans were simply too demanding and extremely disposable.
However, there were still average people of sorts, both cybernetic and human. They filled in the gaps in between. They held jobs and went to school, they owned shops and were complacent with their lower class lives. Most were just thankful to be away from Earth and the ruin it’d become outside of its own major cities, where people in power that stayed behind in an effort to figure out some last ditch plan to reverse the mess they’d made of the planet still roamed like infamous gods. Despised by the lower class; adored by the ones who felt they could still salvage the only home they knew.
Still, they tried their best on Earth. The entertainment business and corporations were still up and running, new celebrities were being ‘discovered’ every day on the streets in hopes of one or two truly catching fire enough to bring up the revenue of whoever’s contract they ‘signed.’ Earth was running out of options once they banned the use of A.I. the best they could. It was still very prevalent in some areas that could no longer be controlled, but they’d set themselves back decades in comparison to X by doing so.
But as the saying goes, the show must go on and money must be made. Regardless of how life had so drastically changed for everyone between the two planets, super stars were still the quickest way to influence the weak and naive minded. Executives and CEO’s knew that all too well.
And so, “eat the rich” was spray painted onto every alley wall, and thieves and hit men were prevalent; sneaking around corners, smiling from grungy doorways on the more dangerous streets around Drax City. Planet X and the beautifully sickening metropolis in it was plucked straight from a movie scene and plopped into the middle of the galaxy in all regards.
But that was the beauty of X.
I thanked the stars every single night that I was one of the lucky ones.